


5+1: one white hair

by hupsoonheng



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5+1 Things, Aging, Death from Old Age, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 19:42:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8222623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hupsoonheng/pseuds/hupsoonheng
Summary: five times steve is confronted with sam's aging against his own, and one time he isn't anymore.





	

**Author's Note:**

> ok so to be fair, nobody prompted this. nobody asked for this, except my own brain, the other night. i've read a few fics where sam's age/aging is compared to steve's, but i've never really seen him written older than 40, which is funny because he's 37 in civil war, canonically. (if you've seen fics where he's older, please feel free to rec in the comments—i wrote this because that's what i was looking for!) i also just see a lot of elderly couples taking care of each other at my job, which was a big inspiration for the first half of #5. 
> 
> now... yes, sam does die of old age, and if that's not for you, then this fic is not for you, and that's okay. this is still a love letter to sam through steve's eyes, but also to be up front i did cry at one point while writing this, sooooo

1.  
Sam's 40th birthday, despite his initial insistence that all he wanted was a quiet dinner with close friends, turns into a four day event. 

The first day is a party put together mostly by Natasha and Sam's cousin Terrence, who Sam has always labeled as "ain't shit," but Terrence is also a friendly one who always knows someone, and if he doesn't know someone, then he knows someone who knows someone else. The alcohol is free-flowing, the food is catered, the music is loud, the apartment is packed, and a very drunk Sam drops it low, like a _lot_. The cops come somewhere between two and three in the morning with a noise complaint, and you make sure it's you, once-upon-a-time Captain America, who answers the door to the NYPD. It's not like your rap sheet isn't miles long at this point, but people who choose to be cops care about image, and for that you're perfect. 

The second day, once Sam and everyone else who isn't you or Bucky is done being hungover, you have that nice quiet dinner with close friends he wanted in the first place. You want to cook for the gesture of it, but you also don't want to ruin dinner with your inability to cope with ratios of seasoning or your impatience, so instead you order from Sam's favorite restaurant of the snooty genre, get a couple bottle of wine, and gather just a few of you around the table. When Sam laughs his eyes crinkle, but they haven't set into permanent crow's feet yet, despite his age. 

The third day—well, that's all for Sam. He whispered some fantasy to you once, something you bet he thought he'd never get, and you only regret that you forgot to whisper _happy birthday_ in the act. 

On the fourth day, you go to Harlem with Sam, just the two of you, and Darlene has cooked up a feast. You've met Darlene before, of course, enough to call her Darlene, enough that you let her feel up your biceps every time you visit while she goes _Ooh! That's too much for me!_ And you've seen a baby picture or two of Sam, ones Sam scanned for her once so she could keep them on her phone to show people. But today is the first time you've seen the honest to god baby books, the tops of the thick leather bound covers lined with dust. She sits in the center of the couch, and makes you and Sam sit to either side of her. 

It's different, somehow, seeing physical 35mm copies of pieces of Sam's childhood over his mother's shoulder. 1979 was a long time ago, and while Darlene has done her best to preserve them, there's still a brownish fade to the gloss. She flips through the years, and you watch Sam grow up in stutters. 1981 Sam is a chubby three year old with wide-set eyes and a wider smile, always reaching for the camera like he thinks he's going to take it, and also just tall enough to get licked by a goat at a petting zoo. 1983—first day of school, clutching both straps of a backpack that's practically bigger than he is while he mugs so hard for the camera that he tilts his face too far back. 

"Feels like yesterday, sometimes," Darlene chuckles as she runs a finger down a page where Sam is eleven, an awkward shape in a sweater and corduroys. Sam says something about how she doesn't need to show you his entire life timeline, and Darlene tells him to stop bullying an old woman. She keeps flipping pages, heads into the 90s, shows you teenage Sam in all his embarrassing glory. Sam almost slams the book shut on his mother's fingers. You consider all the numbers attached to these years, and you think about how as Sam was growing, aging, you were under the ice, perpetually 20 years old. 

You don't get much more time to dwell on it, though, because then Darlene gets tired of the photo albums and asks you and Sam when you plan on getting hitched already, considering how damn old Sam is now. 

 

2.  
Retired hero life is good, but married life is better. You can't explain what difference a pair of rings make, but when you wake up next to Sam now, you feel a sense of peace and finality you realize you've been searching for all your life. There's relaxation, stability—these are all things you've never had before, even when you might have thought you did. When the words _my husband_ drop from your lips your heart flutters. Every time. 

Lapping Sam in DC was fun back in the day, pure flirtation, but now you keep pace with him as you jog through your neighborhood, with you in just whatever athletic outfit you find first and Sam in custom orthotic running shoes for his knees with their vanishing cartilage. He's 45 now, but you look at your husband and all you see is an unstoppable force, a man naturally predisposed to an active lifestyle. His muscles are barely smaller with age, and he still keeps a nine minute mile most days. His hairline creeps back, bit by bit, but you wouldn't call him balding yet. Just a five-head, which he always gives you a shove for. 

Sam has been so youthful for so long that you've joked, countless times, he must have gotten a little shot of the super soldier serum himself somewhere along the line. Even his goatee has been pure pepper with no salt. But one day you hear laughing from the open door of the bathroom, and when you go in, it's Sam angling his head at the mirror over the sink. 

"Would you look at that?" Sam says when he hears you come in. "A white hair. Little motherfucker took its time, huh?" 

And there it is, hiding just a centimeter or so shy of his hairline. One white hair. Sam doesn't keep his hair as short as he used to, lets it grow maybe an inch high that makes him look like (you say, he disagrees) a 70s catalog model. (He says he doesn't have the sideburns to earn that kind of an insult, even though you insist it's a neutral comment.) So maybe the white hair hid out for a little while amongst all Sam's other curls, and today's just its day to make a debut. 

Sam keeps looking at it in the mirror, and you look at your own reflection above him. You don't look 20 anymore, at least, but you're not to 30 yet, either. Somewhere between. Nobody can ever tell you. The only person who celebrates your birthdays is Bucky on Skype calls from Europe, because they're functionally meaningless. If you were born in 1918, but your aging process was dipped in molasses when you were 20, and even after that you spent 70 years on pause, how old are you? 

 

3.  
Darlene's funeral happens on a sunny day in February, when Sam is 52. When Sam got the news of his mother's death he cried in your arms, quiet and shaking, and you ran your hands up and down his back, kissing the top of his head so gently it made no sound. 

She died in her sleep. An enlarged heart. She'd been feeling poorly but keeping it to herself, ever a Wilson in the way she shouldered her own problems in silence. Her grave is next to her husband's, the headstone so much shinier than his with a 34 year gap between them. Sam puts flowers on his father's grave, too, as if he might feel left out from the great beyond. His sister has done the same. 

"Everyone has to go sometime," Sam says as he stands, hoarse from crying for the umpteenth time that week. You look at your husband with his salt and pepper beard, and his soft crow's feet that have finally come in, and you touch your smooth face, and you wonder how true that is. 

 

4.  
Sam's 65th birthday approaches, and so does all the junk mail offering him membership with AARP, a slew of choices of retirement homes, and life insurance policies. There's no more jogging because his knees are shot, a final consequence of too many hard landings as the Falcon, no matter how good he thought his gear was back then. You buy an elliptical and set it up in front of the TV. He doesn't hunch, at least. He's not so old, you think. His hairline finally took that jump to the back of his head. 

"My strapping young husband," Sam will say now, sometimes, with the same inflection every time. You've finally hit 40ish, with lines around your mouth and eyes and you don't think anyone in the history of the world has ever been so happy to see wrinkles. Sure, Bucky had wrinkles by the time you found him in Bucharest, but Bucky didn't spend unbroken decades frozen, and Bucky didn't get Erskine's serum. You saw Bucky last month when he came visiting with Natasha, and you still look younger than him. 

Sam throws his back out in the middle of sex the night before his birthday, and he's humiliated. You lay him out so you can go look up how best to help him and he whines into his hands that this is something that happens to _old people_ , not him. You shush him while you go about following the instructions that seem the most legitimate, and you try not to think of how you've had the same conversation with Sam, down to the word, about where he's put his keys, at least three mornings out of the week for the past six months. 

 

5.  
Sam's hands shake most of the time now that he's 84, and it's imperceptible to anyone but you and whichever cashier happens to be watching Sam trying to insert his card into the chip reader. Sam doesn't like help for little things like this. "If I can't even pay for my own damn groceries, I may as well be dead already," he snapped once, but he saw the stricken look at your face when he said _dead_ and he put one of those shaking hands to your chin to draw you in for a kiss. Kisses don't feel the same when Sam is so fragile, but you cherish them all the more. 

"Look at your hairline go, you old man," he teases you, trailing cool fingertips where your hairline is finally making a question mark around your temple. You're finally entering your mid-50s, maybe, and with it comes a little hair loss, a couple more lines, some back aches. Your body loses that triangle back and you look a little more like a barrel. But you feel a little cheated, especially when you card your fingers through your hair every morning and find the same blond hair, maybe just a little thinner than ten years ago. 

You trail fingertips back, touch every part of him because every second you have left with him is a treasure, and you have to remember this. The gentle ridges of the deep lines on his forehead, the thin spotty skin of the backs of his hands, the bird bones of his clavicle. There's only so many times you can tell him how much you love him before he calls you corny. 

You don't live in the city anymore. It's too much for Sam. It's too much for you, too, if you're honest. The day teenagers almost knocked Sam over in their thoughtless, giggling rush to the other end of the block—the day you almost chased down a bunch of children to beat them senseless, basically, until Sam put his hand on your arm and shook his head with a _Steve, don't_ —was the day you decided. 

Now you live in a little house in the Catskills, hours from the city, surrounded by trees and deer and bears and not much else. Sam likes to sit on the back porch with its mosquito mesh windows, watching the wildlife and relaxing with Bill, the elderly basset hound you adopted together. Except sometimes he falls asleep, and so does Bill, and you touch anxious fingers to both their pulses until you can breathe that sigh of relief. 

Sam doesn't like to talk about all the ways his body is failing. It's hard for him to walk, what with the knees and all, and the back and all, and the everything and all. Bathroom problems. Food problems. Memory problems. You refuse to hire outside help, knowing Sam would hate it, because as much as it bothers him that his husband has to help him onto the toilet, it would bother him more to expose it to a stranger. So you do everything for Sam. 

Sometimes it frightens you, how much time slips away from Sam, but when you lay beside him at night with Bill at the foot of bed, you circle your arm around him and you whisper words from your past. He laughs when you remind him that he said you could have been an ultimate fighter. You feel every breath of his laugh wracking his bones, reminding you of how little of him is physically left. He's not even as tall as he was. 

When you whisper _On your left_ , though, he doesn't laugh. He squeezes your hand, turns over slowly and presses his papery lips to your neck, where he won't be able to see if you cry. 

 

+1  
Like his mother before him, Sam goes in his sleep. You wake to find yourself with your arm across a cold body, and for an hour you do not move, despite the back of your head trying to ply you with facts like _do not embrace dead people_ and _especially not for hours_. You're a goddamn super soldier. You're nearly 150 years old, if you go by calendar years. If holding your dead husband is what kills you after all this time, you welcome death. 

It's Bill who gets you out of bed, because the scent of death has upset him but also he's hungry, and now you're the only person on the entire planet who gives a damn about his old bones and grey face. He whines between bites of his food, and all you do is watch him until he's finished. Bill puts himself under your arm, all slobber and oily fur and the natural stink of an elderly animal, and it's into his hide that you finally cry, for as long as he'll let you. 

You call Natasha. Maybe you should have called Bucky but the trio of Sam, Natasha and you was forged all at once, and it's her that you think should hear about Sam first. 

Of course, Natasha is nearly as old as Sam. She's sharp, but she has low energy and lower patience. Bucky helps you with the funeral arrangements. 

There are a lot of things you should feel when you see the turnout at Sam's funeral. Gratitude that so many people loved him, and didn't forget him, even when you and he went into solitude. Guilt, and shame, that you had all these friends still alive and you haven't spoken to most of them in years. Anger, because where were they? It's not like they reached out to you and Sam, either. Sam died and you were alone on the mountainside to cry on a dog. 

But you don't feel any of it. All you feel is numb as you help ferry the casket into the church. You watch this box full of what's supposed to be the love of your life and it feels fake. Sam is obviously waiting for you at home, watching the bird feeders and waving his cane at marauding squirrels. Every word said by the—preacher? Reverend? The man with the book. Whatever the term is. It sounds like so much buzzing to you. After the funeral Sam's niece and nephew approach you and you don't know what to say to them. Which is fine, because they fill your silence with their condolences, as if they didn't lose an uncle, too. You've always been bad at family. 

For months after Sam's death, you dream of your own gravestone, day and night. You know better than to kill yourself, because Sam's spirit would turn corporeal just long enough to slap your entire face off for even considering it, and if an afterlife existed he'd ghost-divorce you as soon as you arrived. But the idea of having to just—keep on fucking existing—year after year after year when you've already lived out the life you wanted and now you're ready for the ride to be over, it makes it tempting. 

You don't know anymore what you are, because something that lives for this long with another possible half a century to go can't be human. 

You spend all your time thinking about these things, thinking too much. You wander your own house like you might be a ghost, too, trailed by your plodding hound. Bucky says, sell the house. Come to Indiana and live on the farm he got. Bring the damn dog. 

For another year you don't listen. To sell the house is to sell Sam's soul because you see him everywhere, from the porch to the bed to the tiny garden he tended. You were building him a rabbit hutch when he died, and now it sits unfinished in the yard, slowly degrading storm by storm. 

Bucky says, don't be a fucking idiot. The dog's getting real damn skinny, especially for an old fella. Just come to the farm already. 

You hire someone to sell the house for you, furniture and all. You pack up Sam's favorite things, get a crate for Bill, and book a flight for the pair of you out to corn country. 

Bucky doesn't let you mope. He puts you and your strong-for-your-age back to work on the farm, helping tend to the cows. Bill gets the run of the farm and all its acres, which isn't saying much for his arthritic joints, but he does look healthier when he's back on an eating schedule supplied by someone who isn't slack-jawed with grief. 

Work on the farm is distracting, if nothing else. Time goes by so fast it surprises you, even if it's not quite as fast as you'd love for it to go. You check for signs of aging as a compulsory act now, just an ingrained habit with low expectations, right before you go to work. 

And one day, you find it. Your fingers brush against it and you smile at yourself in the mirror, letting tears choke your eyes. 

One white hair. 

"I'm coming, Sam," you whisper.

**Author's Note:**

> anyway, who knows why i wrote that


End file.
